October 2013

October 27, 2013

I got my daughter a store-bought Halloween costume that was
made from a surprisingly nice lamé spandex material: the only problem was that
some of the edges were unfinished, and some of those got stretched a lot
(especially the mask and the top of the cape), and where it got stretched, the
fabric pulled apart. It didn’t rip, but
it lost its shape, so the holes in the mask were completely distorted, and the top
edge of the cape looked in places like stockings running.

I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to iron the material without
melting it, but I went to find some kind of stabilizer thing anyway.

So I went to a big-chain fabric store (which will remain
nameless, except to say that it lived down to the online comments about its
service). I wandered up and down most of
the aisles before I asked for help. What
I was told when I finally got someone to answer a question was: There’s no such
thing as stretchy stabilizer, you must be crazy. And: We don’t have any pre-packaged
stabilizer, everything we have is here on rolls on these shelves, so I couldn’t
possibly tell you what aisle you might check.

It turned out they had half an aisle of pre-packaged
stabilizer. (Did
I use the wrong word? Is this not “stabilizer”
but “backing”? Would I have gotten the
information I’d wanted if I’d known what I was talking about? No. The
manufacturer describes it as “stabilizer,” itself.) I ended up using a very nice
smooth, stretchy iron-on thing that was right there on the shelf. All they had was a 9-yard roll, for 17
dollars. That ought to last me a while. Later I checked the manufacturer’s website, and
they not only sell one-yard lengths, their suggested price for the 9-yard roll
is less than $15.

The product is marked as being for lingerie or spandex (you
can probably find it by searching for “iron-on stabilizer for lingerie or
spandex”), and it looks like exactly the stuff that’s on the inside of my
daughter’s embroidered store-bought tops.
Which is good to know, too, because sometimes I find these backings have
come off in the laundry. It stretches
side-to-side but not up-and-down, and it’s very light-weight and is supposed to
not change the “hand” of the fabric. You’re
supposed to use the “wool” setting on the iron to fuse it, which is pretty
high.

It does seem to have worked, though. I gradually increased the iron setting until
something happened, but the “nylon” setting, the highest setting without steam,
seemed to work fine. At that
temperature, I could press the creases out of the material, as well as get the fusible
backing to set. I added a second layer
in the opposite direction over the most damaged bits of the mask, to keep the
shape from distorting.

So far so good. If
the mask and cape hadn’t started to rip, I probably would have assumed I couldn’t
safely iron the shiny fabric at all, and my daughter would be a creased
superhero.

October 13, 2013

I read Melissa Banks’s story collection, A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing,
several years ago. The other day I
noticed Jenny
Turner’s review of the book at the London
Review of Books. She doesn’t
really like the book: “less
ironic[1] than their epigraphs might suggest . . . a curiously sheltered
and
olde-worlde quality, charming in a way, but also odd.” The criticism amounts to a decision that
people like Banks’s don’t exist in the world, or at least they
shouldn’t. Turner is usually
pretty astute, so I was surprised to find her missing the point in such a way.

For example, she takes note of two anecdotes related by the
narrator of one of the stories, a teenage girl.
At one point, she excuses herself from a family get-together to go to
her room, saying, “Well, I’ve got to go now and shoot heroin.” She doesn’t actually do drugs. Turner is disappointed. She wanted to find out something nasty about
the protagonist, something that would add some “oomph” to the story. Later, she goes to a party with a friend and
uses a clever-for-her-age stratagem to turn down drugs there, pretending they’ve
been, at so young an age, already in rehab.
Turner’s disappointed here too, and for the same reasons.

Turner continues, disapproving of Banks’s writing, morally, “such
jokes are based on an absolute confidence that such things can’t happen to the
teller and her audience, or anyone like them.”

Well, no. The point
of the first anecdote is that the narrator suspects that as far as the adults
are concerned, the character’s minor rebellion—refusing to stay and visit with
the grown-ups—is nearly as close to shooting heroin as makes almost no
difference. They think it’s likely
enough she’s turning bad, like every other teenager except a few. The only proof they’d accept that she isn’t
would be her willingness to sit and chat with aunts for hours and hours. They aren’t prepared to believe in a version
of “bad” that comes well short of hard drug use. The point of the second is that the girl and
her friend do know perfectly well what might (in Turner’s words) “happen” at that
party. Having ended up there—probably
with the encouragement of the same parents who were disapproving when the girl
decided to go alone to her room, rather than stay and sit with other people—they
decided to act and try to preserve themselves from this fate at least a little
bit. The point is about the lack of
support, in this particular world, for this particular girl’s being her own
person without being totally fallen into corruption. To suggest that the narrator is
unaware that it’s dangerous for her to be at this party, if she wants to avoid
drugs, is bizarre. To suggest that the
narrator is somehow unfair to those who weren’t as strong or as scrupulous as
herself, that it was in some actually wrong to be tempted and not to fall, is
mean.

It makes it worse that Turner uses her perplexity with the
characters’ world and their worldview as a reason to mark down the book. The lesson is clear.

October 03, 2013

Everyone’s talking about Breaking
Bad, and I’ve got a post I’ve been writing, on and off, for a year or two,
but thinking about my reaction to it and to similar shows, I decided I wanted
to write about a different one: The HBO series Six Feet Under, especially the last
season, and even more especially the finale, made me so angry that I’ve never
been able to watch “Quality Television” in the same way again. The show had always given me the feeling that
these people live in Hell and don’t know it, but the final episodes managed to
be worse.

Nate, who’s been the point of view character throughout most
of the series, is dead. He was truly
ill, but he died an addict, deluded and irresponsible, and a burden to his
family.

The mother, Ruth, is dead, after having married a charming
older professor, played by George Cromwell, who turned out to be mentally
unstable and borderline abusive, and turned the household painfully upside
down.

David, the middle child, has taken over the funeral parlor
business. With his cop boyfriend, Keith,
he maintains the family traditions.
That’s all well and good, but a funeral parlor? Is there no symbolic significance attached to
that profession? He’s someone who feeds
on the sorrows of others, who makes money from their suffering.

Claire painfully realized that the boyfriend she loved is
having an affair with the (male) art teacher she adores and needs, and that the
teacher is abandoning her as a student in his favor. Flash forward. She has gotten back together with the
Republican boyfriend who was so concerned about her anger against the war in
Iraq, and has returned to the fold for those family dinners. Fast forward from Claire at 21 to Claire at
81. We see her again in the family
house, dying, in her white room and her white bed, alone, except for her
photographs, pictures she has made of a loving family and a beautiful
world. This is a happy ending?

Worse, the series focused so relentlessly on the suffering
imposed on the brothers by their serious, adult lives—Claire is a teenager for
most of the show, and was introduced as having been unavailable at the moment
of her father’s death in a collision, because she was at a party, stoned—that
her suffering feels a little like payback, as if it’s her turn now and she
deserves no more compassion than she had for them at the time

Big Love, similarly,
was ultimately melodrama porn: all about patriarchy and the sufferings of
women, while making them appear heroic for their complicity in upholding that
patriarchy in the face of opposition from mass culture. After these, why should I worry about watching
Breaking Bad or Mad Men the “correct” way?